We don’t need agricultural ‘degrowth’ to decarbonise the economy.
On the Richter scale of political madness, it is hard to match the “degrowth” agenda of the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, imposed on Europe’s sacred farmers by means of regulatory coercion from Brussels.
The Commission’s plan has predictably disintegrated, but only after provoking an angry backlash in all the major agricultural states of western Europe, culminating this week in the siege of Paris by an elephant cavalry of John Deere tractors flying Le Tricolore in an overt display of national resistance.
It has escalated into the worst reverse for the EU’s institutions since the eurozone debt crisis, spreading to centre-Right parties that were once a rock-solid pillar of the pro-European establishment. A rise in French and German duties on tractor diesel was the spark but not the cause of this firestorm.
“The crisis that we are living through was chosen, planned, and willed upon us, against common sense and against our essential interests, by the current European authorities,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy and Anne Sander, respectively president of the French group in the European People’s Party (EPP) and the EPP’s chief farm negotiator.
“Our warnings were brushed aside with the back of the hand by the promoters of this agenda, who systematically chose the most radical line and harshest constraints,” they said.
The Common Agricultural Policy certainly needs an overhaul. It began as a disguised form of war reparations from Germany to France, evolving into a permanent mega-subsidy for agro-industrial conglomerates that distort the market and degrade the land. But it is also a lifeline for millions of families that draw 50pc of their farm income from direct CAP payments. The support has halved in real terms since the mid-1990s.
The political error is to bludgeon farmers from all angles at once, cutting expected incomes by a further 16pc this decade while at the same time imposing swingeing restrictions on how they conduct their affairs.
The sector must cut the use of pesticides and antimicrobials by 50pc, reduce fertilisers by 20pc, set aside more fallow land, and raise the organic share to 25pc – all in the name of the Green Deal. This is how you destroy consent for climate policies.
Brussels has been trying to push through these changes even as it finishes a Latin American trade deal with the Mercosur, opening the door to a flood of imports from countries with much lower labour costs and few environmental curbs.
This degrowth plan has collided with the reality of Putin’s war and the primordial imperative of food supply, a vulnerability driven home by India’s rice export ban and Indonesia’s palm oil ban at the worst moment of the crisis. France already has an agricultural trade deficit, and France is supposed to be the EU’s farming superpower.
The policy is starkly at odds with the EU’s other objective of strategic sovereignty. “Since Russia is using food security as a weapon, we must counter it with a food shield,” said the French farm lobby FNSEA. Well, quite.
The EU regulatory overkill is happening on multiple fronts. The Farmer-Citizens Movement in the Netherlands rose from nowhere to become the largest party in every regional administration last year because of a draconian ruling by a Dutch court enforcing an EU nitrogen rule.
As a matter of statecraft, it would seem obvious that you cannot close 11,200 Dutch farms, by forced-sale if resisted, and compel another 17,600 farms to slash their livestock by a third, without setting off a political crisis and opening the Nexit door for Geert Wilders in The Hague.
If the objective is to prevent soil erosion and the depletion of water basins, or to ensure better husbandry of local land, the matter is best left to regional and national governments answerable to elected parliaments. It is in their own self-interest to act.
If the objective is to lower greenhouse emissions, there are easier and less divisive ways to do so. You pick the low-hanging fruit first, then the mid-hanging fruit, and demonstrate that it is possible to decarbonise society using new technology without loss of economic output or collective welfare. You manage your political capital with care.
You clean up the electricity grid by displacing coal with renewable power, and then by displacing gas, using less and less each year as back-up storage for wind and solar becomes cheaper.
You electrify home heating, road transport, and short-haul aviation and shipping. You go through the gears of the “hard to abate” sectors, starting with steel – 7pc of global emissions but becoming less hard to abate with electric arc furnaces and direct reduced iron plants. You go up the ladder, cutting use of Portland cement (8pc of emissions) by reducing clinker and moving to green cement based on alkali-activated slag.
Much of the carbon footprint attributed to agriculture will take care of itself. Fertilisers (3pc of emissions) can be replaced competitively by making clean ammonia from green hydrogen on site in Northwest Australia, or Chile, or wherever renewable power is cheapest.
Farm equipment will be electrified over time. Most farms can meet the bulk of their power needs from solar panels on barn roofs or in field arrays, which double as shade for livestock.
Clean-tech and ag-tech can do much of the rest so long as Brussels gets out of the way and stops invoking the precautionary principle to obstruct scientific progress. It is not worth fighting over the residual greenhouse footprint that will remain.
The energy transition has become mixed up with an attack on rural communities and cultural identity. It is intruding on the intimate question of what we eat, provoking an even more visceral rebellion against all things “green”. The two should be separated.
The Commission is a caesaropapist technocracy by design and is therefore insulated to an extraordinary degree from common sense and political accountability.
It cannot be removed in any meaningful sense and it is very hard to repeal any of the 180,000-page legal Acquis. The machinery can therefore persist on a misguided course for a long time until something erupts.
This eruption has now happened and throws into doubt the survival of the larger Green Deal. It has revealed the simmering Euroscepticism across deep France – never far from the surface, and not that different from English Euroscepticism, in my experience – but the anti-Brussels backlash has also reached a critical threshold in Germany.
The AfD party on the Right is openly talking of German withdrawal from the EU, mirrored by the new force of Sahra Wagenknecht on the national populist Left. The Christian Democrats are starting to sound very like the British Tories 20 years ago when the pre-EU consensus in Britain started to unravel.
Brussels needs to watch its step.
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A tractor's banner reads "our work comes with a price" as farmers protest over pay and red tape in France - Credit: BERTRAND GUAY/AFP
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